by Erik Larsen, Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

by Erik Larsen, Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

TOMS RIVER, N.J. -- Robert O. Marshall, convicted of arranging the contract murder of his wife in a case made famous by the bestselling book "Blind Faith," is eligible for parole for the first time this year.

The public has until Wednesday to comment to the state Parole Board on Marshall's appeal for release. A hearing could take place as early as August, with Marshall eligible for release up until March of next year, if the board were to approve.

Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph D. Coronato said this week that Marshall should remain behind bars.

"Parole would not be appropriate for Mr. Marshall at this time," said Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office.

Marshall, 74, who is now incarcerated at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, Cumberland County, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Marshall, a once prominent and respected Toms River insurance broker, was convicted in 1986 of orchestrating an elaborate scheme to murder his wife, Maria Marshall, who also was the mother of their three sons.

Marshall, drowning in debt and in love with another woman, had sought to collect a $1.5 million life insurance policy that would pay out on the death of his wife.

Returning home from a night out at Harrah's casino in Atlantic City on Sept. 7, 1984, the Marshalls stopped at the Oyster Creek picnic area on the wooded median of the Garden State Parkway in Lacey. Robert Marshall had pretended there was a problem with the right rear tire on their 1980 Cadillac Eldorado, so the Louisiana hit men he had hired, who were trailing behind in another car, could carry out the execution.

To make the crime look like a plausible robbery, Marshall had himself struck on the head and knocked unconscious as he was ostensibly inspecting the rear wheel. After the trigger man shot and killed Maria Marshall, he slashed the tire so investigators could be led to believe that the couple's vehicle had been sabotaged in Atlantic City. The cover story told to investigators and ultimately a jury, was that robbers had followed the Marshalls from Harrah's, waiting to strike at some point after the damaged tire forced the couple to pull over somewhere.

County's most notorious murder

The murder was the subject of the bestselling 1989 book "Blind Faith" by Joe McGinniss, which in 1990 was adapted into a made-for-TV movie of the same name.

In April, the man who fired the .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol that killed Maria Marshall confessed his guilt almost 30 years after the crime.

Larry N. Thompson, 71, incarcerated at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola for his part in an unrelated armored-car robbery and the attempted murder of a Shreveport police officer, had concluded he had nothing to lose when he told Louisiana and New Jersey law enforcement officials that he was the shooter. In 1986, a jury in Mays Landing found him not guilty of Maria Marshall's murder. The double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution prevents criminal defendants acquitted of crimes from being retried for the same crimes, even if new evidence comes to light or a confession is made.

Thompson spoke matter-of-factly about his guilt and agreed to be recorded doing so to James A. Churchill, retired from the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office. In the mid-1980s, Churchill was the lieutenant in charge of the agency's Major Crime Unit and supervised the Marshall murder case.

However, Churchill said that Thompson was unable to implicate Marshall because a middle man was involved in the murder-for-hire scheme and the two had never spoken. Marshall has maintained his innocence and in 2002 even published a memoir from behind bars titled "Tunnel Vision: Trial and Error."

Marshall and Thompson had never met until they were seated in a courtroom together during their trial for the killing. All of the arrangements made in the murder plot went through another defendant, Billy Wayne McKinnon, who accompanied Thompson to the scene of the crime.

McKinnon, 70, who agreed to testify against his co-conspirators, including Marshall, served one year in state prison and returned home to Greenwood, La.

Another co-conspirator Robert Cumber, 76, who was convicted of having a role in organizing the conspiracy and connecting the defendants, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he refused a plea agreement with prosecutors. In January 2006, Gov. Richard J. Codey commuted Cumber's sentence and Cumber has since returned home to Shreveport.

That leaves Marshall the only figure still behind bars for the crime of his wife's murder.

As late as December 2012, Marshall has unsuccessfully sought to have his sentence reduced, citing a number of health issues. Those ailments as listed in court documents include diabetes, hypertension, dementia, hemorrhoids, athlete's foot and post-nasal drip.

But Marshall has never confessed to his wife's murder. He's come close. In a cryptic statement Marshall made before a packed courtroom on Aug. 18, 2006, just before he was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole in eight years, Marshall said he was at fault for events that led to Maria Marshall's demise.

At the time, the Prosecutor's Office had determined that it made no sense to continue fighting the seemingly never-ending appeals process that kept Marshall from his death sentence.

"I made a terrible mistake," Marshall told the court then, reading from prepared notes. He had caused a lot of suffering for his family and had begun cheating on his wife about 14 months before her murder, he said.

"I take full responsibility for my actions which led to her death. ... I can't change the past," Marshall said, but added that he wanted to change the future. He wanted to spend time with his family and be a contributing member of society, he said.

But it was not clear whether Marshall was confessing to anything new. In his jailhouse memoir, Marshall wrote that he had indeed hired McKinnon - but only in the capacity of a private detective - to investigate whether Maria Marshall had hired her own private detective to uncover her husband's secret romance. Marshall contends that McKinnon was unscrupulous and decided to rob the couple because he was after thousands of dollars they were bringing home after their night of gambling in Atlantic City.

Churchill said this week that perhaps one of the most powerful voices from whom the state Parole Board may be expected to hear will be those of Marshall's sons, Roby, Chris and John.

The two elder sons, Roby and Chris, have come to terms with their father's guilt, while the youngest son, John, who was 13 at the time of his mother's murder, does not believe his father is responsible for the murder and previously has argued for leniency on his behalf, Churchill said.

As for his own thoughts about whether Robert Marshall should be paroled, Churchill said that is a determination for other people to make, not him.

"I have my own personal feelings, but it really doesn't matter what I think," Churchill said.

Once on death row

Marshall originally was sentenced to death in 1986, but after years of appeals he was taken off death row in 2006 after the courts said he was entitled to a new penalty hearing because of ineffective legal representation at trial. A new penalty trial would determine if he would be sentenced to death again or life in prison.

As Ocean County prosecutor a decade ago, Toms River Mayor Thomas F. Kelaher made the decision not to retry the death-penalty phase.

Twenty years after the murder, some of the witnesses had died of natural causes. Memories were unreliable. The state Attorney General's Office had a staffer assigned to the decades-old case full-time, Kelaher remembered.

The cost to the taxpayers to retry the case would have been staggering and the political mood was such that the death penalty as a method of justice in New Jersey was itself about to be put to rest, he said. No one had been executed in New Jersey since 1963 and the death penalty was finally abolished in 2007.

Kelaher believes that given the nature and scale of Marshall's crimes, he is unlikely to be released this year. The idea that Marshall would spend the rest of his life in prison was the bargain the state had thought it made in sparing his life.

Kelaher once had known Marshall and admired his family.

The Kelahers and the Marshalls used to attend Mass at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church together in the 1980s. Their children were about the same age.

"We knew the family very well," Kelaher said. "At Mass at St. Joseph's, the husband and wife would be there with their three boys. They were all finely dressed; the boys had button-down shirts and I used to say to my kids, 'Look at those Marshall boys, look how fine the family looks. â?¦ Whereas, you look like the kids who the cat dragged in.' I still hear about that."